Doug Bain was an active participant in Scottish Left Review Editorial Board meetings up until his untimely death last month. Here, in one of the last things he wrote, he responds to an attack on the relevance of left-wing politics published in the Scotsman.

I read your article with interest. However I have to say I don’t really agree with its main thrust. You detail quite a long list of criticisms of the left – some justified and others not. You end by hailing a new politics which will transcend the old left-right dichotomy. Why then do you devote 99.9 per cent of your article to the left with only a few throw-away lines at the very end about the post-left project? Why is your article not all about the ‘new politics’? From the few lines you devote to this, the defining elements would seem to be:

• Embracing shared sovereignty;
• Decentralism;
• Replacing ‘great British powerism’ with constructing alliances;
• Genuine self-government and self-determination.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘embracing shared sovereignty’ but it sounds like we will remain in the Union – presumably in some kind of federal structure. I find it difficult to equate that with genuine self-government and self-determination – but perhaps I’ve misunderstood you. However, my main reaction to reading these defining features is that there is nothing particularly new here – all of these concepts are a fairly familiar part of a left lexicon. And, even if some have not been explored sufficiently, there is no ideological or philosophical barrier to them being added to the ‘to be done’ list. Your recent work on self-determination would be read by most as a contribution to the debate on democratic renewal – but there is nothing in what you are saying which lies out-with the parameters of left politics.

The Scottish left is not going to dissolve and disappear. It finds expression in the Labour Party, the SNP, the Greens and in the left groupings such as Democratic Left Scotland and the Scottish Left Review. The prospects for bringing these elements together and beginning to articulate a common vision for the future of Scotland are very good.

Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, Polly Toynbee observes “facing an Osborne spending review more rightwing than Thatcher ever dared, the left-right chasm has rarely been starker. In every corner of the globe the tussle persists between progressive and regressive forces.” The fact is that, at the beginning of the 21st century, half the world still makes sense of politics in terms of right and left. Even the SNP and the Green Party, neither of which spring from a left tradition, have very quickly been located on the left/right spectrum as left-of-centre parties. This is not because of some kind of political fixation; the left-right dynamic is a product of, and response to, capitalism and to the myriad ways in which it distorts and corrupts human relationships. In this regard, there is nothing whatsoever that has happened in the past half century which has rendered that mission any less urgent or valid. As long finance capitalism holds sway we will have a left and right.

Embarking on a project of defining a ‘third way’ beyond left and right is not for the faint-hearted Precedent is not encouraging. Mussolini was in fact one of the first to coin the phrase ‘neither left nor right’! Anthony Giddens’ *Beyond Left and Right* was written 16 years ago and has not, to put it mildly, inspired a new post-left vision. The terrain of third-way politics has remained pretty barren intellectually.

So why go there? Your argument seems to be that the left is bankrupt of new ideas, locked into a black-and-white, modernist, determinist mode of thinking. I just don’t recognise that left. The critique of modernism is now close-on 50 years old and the postmodernist thesis has been thoroughly debated and explored over several decades – e.g. Willie Thompson’s *Postmodernism and History*. I think there is now a consensus that while postmodernism provides valuable insights in the field of aesthetics, it’s contribution to social theory is much more limited and, as a philosophy to inform a post left political project, it is a non-starter. If Jacques Derrida’s help was enlisted in campaigning for improved postal services, the opening paragraph of his campaigning leaflet would read: *Not that the letter never arrives at its destination, but it belongs to its structure that it is always possible for it not to arrive there….A letter does not always arrive at its destination and since that belongs to its structure, it can be said that it never arrives there truly, that when it arrives the fact that it is capable of not arriving afflicts it with the torment of an internal misdirection* (quote from Willie’s book). I think it is becoming clearer now that, politically, postmodernism was a turn to the right and even people like Frederic Jameson are conceding that its days may be numbered and that the challenge is, in fact, to re-define modernism. As someone wrote somewhere, if you live in the slums of Mumbai, modernism probably sounds quite a good idea. Beyond post-modernism, the only other recent post-left articulation I can think of is Etzioni’s communitarianism – which Blair and Clinton briefly flirted with but which has run into the sand.

Far from being moribund, the left continues to generate a rich and diverse intellectual output sustaining influential journals such as *Soundings* and *New Left Review* ( not to mention *Perspectives* and *Scottish Left Review*). Far from being stuck in the past, the centre of gravity of thinking is very much post-Marxist. The left has a long and rich history of theory and struggle and has continually adapted and changed to accommodate new circumstances. To argue that we should turn our backs on this tradition and attempt to invent a new discourse seems to me to be foolhardy in the extreme. And quite unnecessary.

The Scottish left is not going to dissolve and disappear. It finds expression in the Labour Party, the SNP, the Greens and in the left groupings such as DLS and SLR. It seems to me the prospects for bringing these elements together and beginning to articulate a common vision for the future of Scotland are very good.

The Scottish left is not going to dissolve and disappear. It finds expression in the Labour Party, the SNP, the Greens and in the left groupings such as DLS and SLR. It seems to me the prospects for bringing these elements together and beginning to articulate a common vision for the future of Scotland are very good.

Doug Bain (1939 – 2010)